The Sarajevo Hagaddah: Held Hostage in a Crumbling and Shuttered Museum

An exquisite 14th-century illuminated manuscript, one of few artifacts to have survived the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, is in danger. In a story not unlike that of many Sephardi families, the Haggadah migrated first to Venice and then to Sarajevo, then the capital of the Ottoman province of Bosnia and home to a thriving Jewish community. The manuscript managed to survive both the Holocaust and the fierce fighting in Bosnia in the 1990s. But today the ongoing tensions between Bosnia’s central government and its autonomous Serbian Republic are holding it captive:

Now the Sarajevo Haggadah sits in limbo in the bankrupt National Museum on the Bosnian capital’s main drag. The museum closed its doors on October 4, 2012, after its employees went without salaries for an entire year. . . . The museum, along with several other cultural institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was left without a government body responsible for running and funding it, leaving it outside the budgets of the country’s various administrative bodies.

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Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Bosnia, Hagaddah, Jewish art, Manuscripts, Sarajevo, Sephardim

 

Europe Must Stop Tolerating Iranian Operations on Its Soil

March 31 2023

Established in 2012 and maintaining branches in Europe, North America, and Iran, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network claims its goal is merely to show “solidarity” for imprisoned Palestinians. The organization’s leader, however, has admitted to being a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a notorious terrorist group whose most recent accomplishments include murdering a seventeen-year-old girl. As Arsen Ostrovsky and Patricia Teitelbaum point out, Samidoun is just one example of how the European Union allows Iran-backed terrorists to operate in its midst:

The PFLP is a proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides the terror group with money, training, and weapons. Samidoun . . . has a branch in Tehran. It has even held events there, under the pretext of “cultural activity,” to elicit support for operations in Europe. Its leader, Khaled Barakat, is a regular on Iran’s state [channel] PressTV, calling for violence and lauding Iran’s involvement in the region. It is utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the EU has not yet designated Samidoun a terror group.

According to the Council of the European Union, groups and/or individuals can be added to the EU terror list on the basis of “proposals submitted by member states based on a decision by a competent authority of a member state or a third country.” In this regard, there is already a standing designation by Israel of Samidoun as a terror group and a decision of a German court finding Barakat to be a senior PFLP operative.

Given the irrefutable axis-of-terror between Samidoun, PFLP, and the Iranian regime, the EU has a duty to put Samidoun and senior Samidoun leaders on the EU terror list. It should do this not as some favor to Israel, but because otherwise it continues to turn a blind eye to a group that presents a clear and present security threat to the European Union and EU citizens.

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Read more at Newsweek

More about: European Union, Iran, Palestinian terror, PFLP